Firefox for mobile – tracking progress

by Irina Sandu

The reset for the native-UI Fennec has put the mobile team on a fast-paced development effort to rebuild front-end functionality for Firefox for mobile. As I wrote last week, this new version is scheduled to go to beta pretty soon. For this special release we have went away from the train model of regular Firefox releases and went to a system where we have release criteria and functionality for the product. These are represented in Bugzilla by release blocker bugs. Here are some highlights of progress made in the last week in Firefox for mobile – for the first native UI release and beyond.

We merged the Maple branch to mozilla-central, bringing GL layers support into the nightly builds. This makes Firefox crisper and snappier. – bug 725095

We started work on a Reading Mode to enable easier reading for various form factors. It will automatically adapt to screen size. – bug 696921

There is a long and interesting discussion about video codec support on mobile. The bug number is 714408, but the discussion is on the dev-platform list.

We plan to include support for more types of bookmarks. We currently have standard bookmarks and folders, but we want to also add separators, livemarks and queries. Waiting for UX designs first. bug 737024

Users will find the button to activate and set up Sync right from the default home page. bug 737024

We started work for WEBAPP intent, to achieve parity with the XUL version. This is not a blocker for release. bug 737050

We improved the menu for picking and capturing media (pictures, videos), so that we don’t have 2 different buttons: one for choosing a file and another one for taking the picture / video. The less taps to do something, the better. bug 730289

We added the Options menu for add-ons in the same place in the Add-on Manager, for easy customizations. The menu is visible only when the add-on is enabled. bug 696533

We are working on the ability to delete individual form entries from history. When Firefox has multiple form entries stored from past usage, but one of them is no longer valid, the user will be able to tell Firefox to forget it. bug 735740

We are also discussing whether to continue supporting Android v 2.1 (Eclair). Currently, 1.76% of Firefor for mobile users are on this platform and 6.6% of the overall market. bug 662891